ntfsmount - NTFS module for FUSE.

ntfsmount device mount_point [-o options]

ntfsmount is a FUSE module that rely on libntfs. You need FUSE to compile it, xattr is recommended, but not mandatory.

Fully implemented ntfsmount features are:

* Read-only access to normal, sparse and compressed files.

* Overwrite normal and sparse files *with* changes to size.

* List/Read/Write/Add/Remove named data streams.

Partly implented features:

* Create/Delete/Move files and directories.

* Hard link files.

Below is a summary of all the options that ntfsmount accepts.

uid=, gid=, umask=

Provide default owner, group, and access mode mask. These options work as documented in mount(8). By default, the files/directories are owned by user that mounted volume and he/she has read and write permissions, as well as browse permission for directories. No one else has any access permissions. I.e. the mode on all files is by default rw------- and for directories rwx------, a consequence of the default fmask=0177 and dmask=0077. Using a umask of zero will grant all permissions to everyone, i.e. all files and directories will have mode rwxrwxrwx.

fmask=, dmask=

Instead of specifying umask which applies both to files and directories, fmask applies only to files and mask only to directories.

show_sys_files

If show_sys_files is specified, show the system files in directory listings. Otherwise the default behaviour is to hide the system files. Note that even when show_sys_files is specified, "$MFT" may will not be visible due to bugs/mis-features in glibc. Further, note that irrespective of show_sys_files, all files are accessible by name, i.e. you can always do "ls -l '$UpCase'" for example to specifically show the system file containing the Unicode upcase table.

default_permissions

By default FUSE doesn't check file access permissions, the filesystem is free to implement its access policy or leave it to the underlying file access mechanism (e.g. in case of network filesystems). This option enables permission checking, restricting access based on file mode. This is option is usually useful together with the 'allow_other' mount option.

allow_other

This option overrides the security measure restricting file access to the user mounting the filesystem. This option is by default only allowed to root, but this restriction can be removed with a configuration option described in the previous section.

kernel_cache

(NOTE: Work only with FUSE-2.3.0) This option disables flushing the cache of the file contents on every open(). This should only be enabled on filesystems, where the file data is never changed externally (not through the mounted FUSE filesystem). Thus it is not suitable for network filesystems and other "intermediate" filesystems.

NOTE: if this option is not specified (and neither 'direct_io') data is still cached after the open(), so a read() system call will not always initiate a read operation.

large_read

Issue large read requests. This can improve performance for some filesystems, but can also degrade performance. This option is only useful on 2.4.X kernels, as on 2.6 kernels requests size is automatically determined for optimum performance.

direct_io

This option disables the use of page cache (file content cache) in the kernel for this filesystem. This has several affects:

- Each read() or write() system call will initiate one or more read or write operations, data will not be cached in the kernel.

- The return value of the read() and write() system calls will correspond to the return values of the read and write operations. This is useful for example if the file size is not known in advance (before reading it).

max_read=

With this option the maximum size of read operations can be set. The default is infinite. Note that the size of read requests is limited anyway to 32 pages (which is 128kbyte on i386).

force

Force mount even if errors occurred. Use this option only if you know what are you doing and don't cry about data loss.

ro

Mount filesystem read-only.

no_def_opts

By default ntfsmount acts as "default_permissions,allow_other" was passed to it, this option cancel this behaviour.

succeed_chmod

Don't change any permissions and don't return error on chmod operation.

locale=

You can set locale with this option. It's useful if locale enviroment variables are not set before partitions from /etc/fstab had been mounted.

All data on NTFS is stored in streams, which can have names. A file can have more than one data streams, but exactly one must have no name. The size of a file is the size of its unnamed data stream. Usually when you don't specify stream name you are access to the unnamed data stream. If you want access to named data stream you need to add ":stream_name" to the filename. For example: by opening "some.mp3:artist" you will open stream "artist" in "some.mp3". But windows usually prevent you from accessing to named data streams, so you need to use some program like FAR or utils from cygwin to access named data streams. NTFS FUSE module don't prevent you from accessing to named data streams so you can use your preferred utils to access them. You can even delete them using rm. You can list all named data streams by getting "ntfs.streams.list" extended attribute. NOTE: The last feature is unique for NTFS FUSE module and maybe will be never supported by kernel driver.

Mount /dev/hda1 to /mnt/ntfs-fuse using ntfsmount: ntfsmount /dev/hda1 /mnt/ntfs-fuse

Read-only mount /dev/hda5 to /home/user/mnt and make user with uid 1000 to be owner of all files: ntfsmount /dev/hda5 /home/user/mnt -o ro,uid=1000

/etc/fstab entry for above: /dev/hda5 /home/user/mnt ntfs-fuse ro,uid=1000 0 0

Umount /mnt/ntfs-fuse: fusermount -u /mnt/ntfs-fuse

Cat "artist" named data stream of "some.mp3": cat some.mp3:artist

Write "Sympho Black Metal" to "genre" named data stream of "some.mp3": echo Sympho Black Metal > some.mp3:genre

Remove "album" named data stream from "some.mp3": rm some.mp3:album

List all named data streams for "some.mp3": getfattr -n ntfs.streams.list some.mp3

No bugs are known at present. If you find any bugs, please send an email to <linux-ntfs-dev@lists.sourceforge.net>.

ntfsmount was written by Yura Pakhuchiy. This manual page use information from Documentation/filesystems/ntfs.txt from linux kernel source, and from README from FUSE.

With love to Marina Sapego.

Many thanks to Miklos Szeredi for advices and answers about FUSE.

ntfsmount is part of the ntfsprogs package and is available from

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/downloads.html.

ntfsprogs(8), attr(5), getfattr(1)